Bog flowers

At the end of the nineteenth century, amateur photography was an expensive and demanding hobby which only the well-off could afford: only wealthy upper middle-class people had enough money for expensive photographic equipment and the required leisure to tinker around with the still very complicated technology of taking and developing photographs. The brothers Theodor and Oscar Hofmeister belonged to this class and were the protagonists of a movement which led in 1891 to the founding of the first Amateur Photography Club Hamburg. These artists, later called “Pictorialists”, aspired to give photography an equal and independent status alongside painting.